Drive up ownership of the key messages, and improve the quality of cascade briefings

Use this simple tip to ensure ownership of the key messages, and improve the quality of cascade briefings; build a session into your next conference to get participants practicing how they are going to bring the main points to life and make them relevant in their part of the business.

How to paint a picture of future success for your organisation and get your people telling stories about how their hard work makes a difference

Experience tells us that staff contribute more fully to business performance when they know how the work they do day in and day out fits into the grand scheme of things. Yet all too often, when asked how their work contributes to achieving even their team’s goals, never mind the company’s, they complain they can’t see the wood for the trees.

If we consider the wood to be the context in which teams and individuals operate and the trees to be the content of their work, they need to be able to see both the wood and the trees. Indeed, if you extend the metaphor, they might also benefit from understanding the forest too, if you think of that as the marketplace in which the business operates.

Creating alignment

What’s needed is total alignment between the actions of every member of staff, wherever they work, and the delivery of business objectives. Jack, on reception, needs to be able to explain how his making customers feel welcome and valued helps Jill, the sales director, achieve her targets. And Janet, in R&D, needs to be able to articulate how her latest innovation helps John, the managing director, create new markets.

Creating a laser straight ‘line of sight’ between an individual’s daily tasks and the longer-term goals of the business is often as tricky in a small start-up as it is in a large established business. So how can you do it

A way forward

Although it’s better than nothing, sharing a spreadsheet as part of an annual objective-setting session is one way forward. But it’s hardly likely to get people throwing back the duvet and racing in to work on a daily basis.

But there are some serious signposts for a better way forward:

Paint a picture of future success for your organisation…

Show your people where you’ve come from, where you are now, where you want to be as a business and how you’re going to get there. Ideally in a single image, via a universally appropriate metaphor.

Get your people telling stories about how their hard work makes a difference…

Imagine the power of your entire workforce being able to explain back to you, in their own words, how they can contribute to the success of your business.

If you can combine the impact of a visual image with the power of storytelling, then you create a super-channel – a channel that our clients call many different things: big picture, rich image, learning map. What they all call it is successful!

Big picture success

The leader of a utilities business, referring to the success of his organisation’s big picture, said: “Eighty percent of our people who climb poles or dig holes are now aware of the business plan and their role in delivering it.”

Third-party employee research in a client from the medical devices world found a 24% improvement against the question “I know what I can do to help achieve our strategy.” And in an aviation client, 76% of around 2,000 staff said they had “a clear understanding of this company’s objectives and vision” – up 22% on the year before.

Unlike the annual objective-setting approach, a big picture can be prominently displayed as an image throughout your business and reinforced through all of your internal media. This will trigger your people to tell and retell the right kind of stories daily: forest, wood, trees, twigs, the lot. And you won’t even get a splinter trying to align them!

How leaders and communicators can win hearts and minds in change management

Asking a group of people to change the way they’ve been doing something for years often triggers highly charged emotional responses, and they are rarely positive. Yet when tackling change management, so many organisations seem to ignore this. Instead they rely heavily on filling out logical but complex change templates and ordering people to do things differently.

Administrative processes and direct instructions have their place in change management, for example when health and safety compliance is needed. However, no amount of form-filling by leaders is going to inspire people to let go of their old ways of working and adopt new ones.

In fact, telling people to change just causes them to take a stand and doggedly cling to the status quo. When Kennedy said: “We’ll put a man on the moon by the end of the decade”, he inspired an entire nation as well as NASA. He didn’t then whip out a Gantt chart to prove his thinking!

Change from within

However inspiring the carefully crafted vision for the future, nothing will actually change if people aren’t convinced that they need to move on from what they’re currently doing.

Sure, they might nod and smile when you talk about the desired change; they’re not politically naive or stupid. But the minute you walk down the corridor, they’ll crack on doing exactly what they’ve always done. As the American author Irene Peter wryly noted: “Just because everything is different, doesn’t mean anything has changed.”

In my experience, what really works is creating an environment where people identify for themselves that the way they are currently doing things is no longer the way forward. Better still, they start persuading each other and, even better still, they start telling their leaders.

So, your job as leader or communication professional is to paint the picture of success, then let people join the dots for themselves. That’s the way to win hearts as well as minds.

Creating ‘change from within’ takes thought and effort, especially compared to ordering people to change ‘because HQ want us to’. But the foundations you’ll create will result in far greater ownership and advocacy of the change. This way, you will build a more solid structure to support sustained change. Find practical examples of how to make this happen, in the early chapters of John Kotter’s The Heart of Change.

Beyond ‘lessons learnt’

Now you’ve got your people fired up and passionate about delivering the change, perhaps even co-creating ways to deliver it. But, the gravitational pull of templates and form-filling at the other end of the project can still tarnish your efforts. Enter the ‘lessons learnt’ or ‘post implementation review”. Unfortunately, once completed, this is often consigned to the darker recesses of a SharePoint site never to be discussed or seen again. And the result? Little actually gets learnt.

While of course complying with the agreed and audited internal process, why not make heroes and heroines of your new-found champions for change in a very public space? Get them sharing their success stories on your intranet, acknowledging the challenges they’ve overcome in your internal publications, showcasing the difference they’ve made at your events and inspiring their fellow workers to new heights in their corridor conversations. All you are doing is bringing your lessons learnt to life.

And why wait until the end of the project? You can add real momentum to your change effort by celebrating success early and often.

What’s on the minds of colleagues right now? Are they fired up and engaged? Disinterested? Fearful? Now there’s a way to know for sure

Staying in touch with the ‘word on the street’ is critical in connecting with an audience. Getting it wrong can have serious consequences – just ask Theresa May, David Cameron, and countless other political leaders. In business too, not being tuned into what your colleagues think and feel can mean being disconnected from reality.

A couple of years ago, I was working with a senior leader about to invest in bringing together 500 managers from across his retail business for a conference. My job was to help him shape his keynote. To start with, I asked him what his top five messages were and he quickly trotted out a list of strategic goals. “And what do you think your audience is actually talking about right now?” I asked. Cue a long pause until he very honestly volunteered: “I’ve no idea… but I guess you’re going to tell me we should find out.”

A quickly organised piece of research revealed absolutely zero correlation between what he planned to say and what his people wanted to know. Armed with this insight, we were able to position his key strategic messages in a context that would meet the needs of his audience – and to great effect, according to their feedback.

Of course, keeping in touch with your people’s needs and views shouldn’t just be an ad hoc or even annual exercise. Far better to have a reliable, accurate and easy way of keeping in constant touch with the word on the street. We’ve worked with our partner IT Hummingbird to develop an agile employee engagement app to do just that.

Engage with an agile employee engagement app

Engage is a mobile app that quickly and easily allows you to dial in to the hot topics in your business. This next-generation employee engagement app collects real-time views, ideas and feedback from across the workforce. The data can be dissected at the click of a button by role, function, site and so on. User-friendly infographics and advanced word clouds show where communications are cutting through and where they are not.

If I’d had an agile employee engagement app in my locker back when I was working with that retail client, it would have made life much easier… We’d use it to discover the views and concerns of conference participants and also of the teams they lead. We’d dive deeper into the data to identify trends in particular areas. We’d then present the insights to leaders and use them to shape the whole conference.

Then, of course, we’d deploy the app afterwards to check how well the conference messages were getting through and being understood. And we’d use it on an on-going basis to monitor the mood around planned strategic changes and other specific topics. All of which would inform the evolving communication plan.

Engage to stay connected

Find out how you could use Engage in your business to help you stay connected by booking a demo today.

The alternative might be that, like some politicians, you become disconnected, lose your mandate to lead and then your best people; and maybe even your customers vote with their feet.

For your organisation to execute its strategy, employees need a clear destination and a route map to follow

When facilitating conferences, I sometimes start with an icebreaker called ‘Point North’. I get everyone in the hall to stand up, close their eyes and, without talking, turn round three times on the spot. With their eyes still closed, I get them all to point North. Then I ask them to open their eyes. The inevitable result is a forest of arms pointing in multiple directions.

This little exercise serves to make the very simple point that, without adequate information, in this case, visual or auditory sensory input, it’s easy to get confused about where we’re meant to be going.

It’s something that applies to many large organisations – thousands of people are no doubt working very hard, yet their efforts are often not focused on what’s really important for the organisation’s success. ‘Point North’ sets the stage nicely for the work we often get participants to do during a conference to address this problem by setting and agreeing the organisation’s aspirations and goals, creating a common sense of direction and then creating the plan for getting there.

Indeed, that’s a fair summary of the nature of much of Axiom’s work these days. More often than not, we are working with clients who want to bring about major change in their business, often to implement a new corporate strategy. We help people at all levels in the organisation reach a shared understanding of both the destination and the route. It’s something I have recently come to think of as helping organisations navigate the strategic journey they want to take – in short, strat nav.

Paint the Big Picture

One of our favourite ways to achieve this is through our highly successful Big Picture approach. We depict an organisation’s strategy through a large-scale image that provides a visual analogy and supporting narrative for the journey being undertaken. The image shows where the organisation has come from, its current position, where it’s heading and how it’s going to get there. Crucially, it helps employees see where they fit in and how they can contribute to the journey.

In the past, we’ve illustrated company change programmes as missions into space, mountain-climbing expeditions, ambitious construction projects and major sporting events. But there’s always a common theme: a journey from the old ways of working to the new.

The Big Picture is so powerful because images can engage in a way that the written or spoken word may not. Professor Paul Martin Lester of California State University says people remember only 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they read, but 80% of what they see and do. And in this digital age, our reliance on visual stimuli is growing. “We are becoming a visually mediated society,” says Prof Lester. “For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished not through words, but by reading images.” What’s more, images are far more immediate and memorable than documents and presentations. They also work internationally across language barriers.

Stories grab attention, are more memorable and convincing than simple information, and are much more likely to lead to action. They provide a narrative everyone can buy into and get passionate about and are easily retold.

Charting a course for success

We’ve combined storytelling with visual images in our Big Picture approach for dozens of clients. For Swedish surgical equipment maker Mölnlycke, we developed a campaign that envisaged its strategy as a sailing voyage. The visual analogy we co-created made a compelling case for change and provided a clear view of what success would look like and the challenges that lay ahead year by year.

Mattias Hakeröd, global HR director at Mölnlycke, told us afterwards: “Our people really liked this approach to explaining our strategy. It helped us overcome language and cultural barriers, and now everyone is talking about the strategy at all levels – including those who wouldn’t usually engage.”

Set the direction, provide the route, take people with you on the journey

Of course, the Big Picture is just one possible approach. We’ve just recently finished helping the UK arm of a major global merchant with a simple, pragmatic communication campaign executed against a very demanding timeline to help their people embark on a major two-year change journey. The organisation was announcing a radical new strategy that involved significant investment, merging and closure of branches and a rebrand. For some colleagues, change would be exciting and promising; for others, it would mean disruption and the threat of redundancy.

We worked with the top team to put together a management event, a series of briefings across the company and a range of engaging communication materials to persuade people of the importance of the changes and allay their concerns. At the outset, it was essential that we openly and truthfully gave colleagues the context – the market dynamics that made the changes essential, the long-term aims, the major milestones along the way – as well as helping them work out what it all meant for them at a local, individual, day-to-day level. The feedback we’ve had so far has been very encouraging – employees seem to be buying into the change plan and the approach to communicating it.

Whatever the method, getting everyone to be clear on the destination, engage in the journey and understand the detailed route map – that’s the task for communicators today. So maybe it’s time for you to work out how you’re going to provide a strat nav for your organisation?

Social media training for leaders and managers deliver a return on your investment in these digital tools

It’s always struck me as ironic that organisations spend a small fortune on internal social media tools like Yammer, Jive and Chat only to find that no-one engages with them. So how do you maximise your return on investment in these channels and use them to help deliver business goals? Effective communication and social media training has to be the answer.

I find that all too often the icons for these social media tools appear on people’s desktops or devices without explanation. Perhaps it’s the modern equivalent of dropping a computer mouse on every desk overnight without showing anyone what to do with it or the benefits of using it. Famously in a Star Trek movie, when going back in time, engineer Scotty picked up a mouse and spoke in to it like it was a microphone.

The thing to do is properly launch the new social media tool with a clear explanation of why the business has invested in it and a compelling account (sparing the technical details) of what it can do for individuals and how it’ll help them get their jobs done better. And even if it’s too late for a launch, it’s perfectly acceptable to back-announce the new tool in a similar way.

In tandem with your launch or back-announcement, it’s also vital to train employees in how to get value from this shiny new tool.

Social media and employee engagement

In a social media training workshop we ran for line managers in one client organisation recently, we began with a general brainstorm of the things keeping participants awake at night. We then crossed out the challenges that effective employee engagement could not help with. The list stayed pretty much unaltered – the obvious conclusion was that the vast majority of line managers’ challenges could be tackled, in some way, through improvements or interventions in employee engagement.

Workshop participants were now bought into common challenges and energised to solve them. Enter some of the new tools at our disposal to improve employee engagement: internal social media. And that’s when the cynicism, negativity, even fear kicked in: “I don’t understand social media,” “What if people are negative online?,” “I’m too busy to use it.” And my all-time favourite in any change situation: “It’ll never work here.”

Such concerns are understandable. A quick Google search on “social media at work” returns results connected to discipline, grievance, being fired, policy and risk. Heady and motivational stuff, eh?

And yet nearly all participants said they were active on social media outside work. And most people love the collaborative tech I bring to conferences and events, such as the iPad-based activities powered by Crystal Interactive. So the appetite for interacting online with colleagues is clearly there.

Remove the fear factor

The next thing to do in our social media training session was some jargon-busting. The simple explanations we gave of frequently used social media terms were welcomed by those willing to admit they didn’t know what a hashtag was (and were probably even more welcomed by those who wouldn’t openly reveal their ignorance!) I like to explain a hashtag as looking like the top view of a box with its flaps open… #. See what I mean? Now you’ve got a box to store content about a particular topic so you and others can easily find it in future.

We also introduced some plain English guidelines on using social media inside the firewall. One of my favourites: “If you wouldn’t print it on a T-shirt and wear it in a public place, don’t key it into your social media platform.”

Build relevant case studies

In response to the familiar cry “Yes, but we aren’t British Airways”, the task was to create a bank of relevant case studies, based on participants’ own organisational issues rather than someone else’s. This is where our social media training gets really pragmatic. We get participants to vote for their three or four shared challenges and then create actual social media solutions and campaigns, to be led by participants, that address these issues. In other words, we help participants get to grips with how they are going to deploy social media tools – in their own business context.

We make sure we build measurement into the campaigns designed with participants. The aim is to end up with hard proof of the power of social media tools in that organisation. In combination, the case studies, measures and advocacy of those involved can then spark similar solutions and campaigns within that business.

Working with a global pharmaceutical company, we needed to reinforce some business change messages with an audience of 60 who last got together six months earlier for a face-to-face event. This time around, we had just three hours and needed to deliver the whole thing virtually. We combined WebEx with the social media tool Chatter to drive interactivity and action-planning through, for instance, getting participants to comment on content in real time, ask questions and complete quizzes.

Tellingly, the vast majority of participants had not so much as opened their Chatter account before the event. By the end of it, they were saying how much they had valued and enjoyed using the tool and how connected they felt with one another despite being spread all around the world.

If you’re serious about turning a social media icon on a desktop into an iconic case study of how social media can help deliver business goals, your social media training had better mean business.

An employee engagement app can either add to the noise or create crystal clarity – so choose wisely

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the rise of the employee engagement app as an internal communication tool. Only the other day, I was catching up on my emails while travelling on the London Underground. As I stepped off the train, I heard the familiar announcement: “Mind the gap” – and came uncomfortably close to dropping my phone between the train and the platform edge. It was ironic that the mail I’d been reading was from a client complaining about no-one using their employee engagement app. Mind the g-app, indeed!

The client in question, a comms manager in a forward-thinking public sector organisation, was complaining that a recently installed Jive app, which had suddenly appeared on desktops and mobile devices, was not proving popular. A quick call to the in-house IT team shed no light. “Ah yes, that replaces Yammer,” the person in the contact centre responded, “No-one used that either.” First up, surely when we put these things in place, we have to give some practical guidance and training about how to use them to good effect before their only use becomes ‘liking’ the litter-in-the-car-park thread.

In this digital era, we have more and more ways to share information with the workforce, most recently through the rise of apps. But satisfaction with how most organisations communicate isn’t, in my experience, getting any better. In fact, people at all levels complain about it more than ever. If we are just sending more noise, from more sources, via more channels, we are simply adding to the confusion.

Beyond broadcast

I am, however, encouraged to see that some employee engagement apps are now focusing on more than just broadcast communication by, for example, measuring the reach of specific channels. Even so, knowing how many people opened an email or clicked on a newsletter still doesn’t tell us what they took away from that communication. Did they understand it? What did they make it mean? What are they going to do differently as a result?

My passion for 25 years has been making a difference to organisational performance through employee engagement – and then being able to prove it. I want to be able to demonstrate to CEOs that the messages from their leadership event actually left the conference room and were understood and acted on by staff at the coalface, who are now fully aligned. I want to pinpoint where change programmes are being implemented at speed and where they are bogged down. I want to show that top talent is motivated to stick around and to help drive new ways of working.

The ‘g-app’ I want to fill is the one between the aspirations leaders have for their organisations and the day-to-day reality of what really happens at the sharp end of the business – out in the field, in regional offices, on the shop floor.

An app to generate dialogue and killer data

Rather than just banging on about how important it is that companies do this, Axiom is trying to help – by harnessing the rise of mobile technology and social tools. Right now, we’re fine-tuning a new employee engagement app that will quickly and efficiently provide up-to-the-minute data on the word on the street, depict the mood of the business in innovative infographics and chart the extent to which staff understand key messages – by audience and over time.

So, do you agree that employee engagement apps should be creating crystal clarity about what really matters to organisational performance rather than just adding to the noise? If so, reach out and help us shape a cutting-edge app that meets the needs of your business.

Five ways to connect senior leaders and the workforce through better internal communication

We’re all familiar with Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Emperor’s new clothes; a leader who thinks everything is fine and whose followers fail to point out anything to the contrary.

In the business world, this is not a ‘once upon a time’ fairy story. I often come across senior leaders who are out of touch with what really goes on at the coalface. Sycophantic or back-watching direct reports and multi-layer hierarchies are often to blame. But the biggest culprit of all is poor internal communication. The consequences for leaders, their people and the organisation can be severe: lack of alignment, mistrust, missed opportunities and wasted effort.

Encouragingly, research tells us that business performance improves when staff are heard and their feedback acted on – a key plank of internal communication. A Watson Wyatt study of 115 companies (2006, 2008) tells us that companies with highly engaged employees achieve financial performance four times greater than those with poor employee attitudes.

Here I highlight five successful internal communication solutions we’ve put in place over the years to drive open and candid dialogue between leaders and the workforce.

The elephant in the room

We often facilitate ‘elephants’ at conferences and events. We split participants into small groups and ask them each to discuss and pinpoint ‘the unspoken challenges that stop the organisation performing to its potential’. These are listed on Post-It notes or shared via iPads (without being attributed to individuals) and then prioritised for action planning. To stop the session turning in to a whinge fest, we add the caveat that ‘these must be things within our gift to solve’.

Good external facilitation helps reinforce that the process is truly anonymous and ensures that even politically charged content is surfaced. The resulting dialogue often creates genuine breakthroughs. With a large pharma we worked with some years ago, we uncovered some deep-seated issues relating to a merger that were subsequently addressed.

Royal visits

As senior leaders arrive for their tour of the building, introduce them to a cross-functional working party in a meeting room. This team are tasked with identifying and prioritising the barriers to business success locally and then creating five practical ways to improve performance. They do their thinking while the VIPs are being introduced to staff and the smell of new paint. As the tour ends, leaders hear the reflections and recommendations of the working party. Staff feel they are being heard and leaders get some concrete insights to act on.

Back to the floor

Senior leaders are charged with working at the sharp end of the business, usually for a week, not just a quiet afternoon. The aim is to arm them with real-life evidence, not distant observations, on which to base their decisions and plans. They undertake all of the duties of colleagues at the coalface (as long as that’s not a safety risk). We often suggest they are shadowed by a member of staff. Their insights can be recorded via video and edited for use as part of an internal communication campaign. I’ve seen priorities shifted and projects repurposed or even dropped as a consequence of this activity, for example the complete rewriting of a retail company’s training programme based on what the leader learned about the need.

Sounding boards

Sounding boards are representative groups of employees drawn from different functions, lengths of service and varying degrees of positivity vs. cynicism. In other words, a realistic cross-section of staff. We often put them in place during change programmes and leave them in place as the change becomes BAU.

Their task is to help shape how messages are positioned and delivered (not craft the actual messages themselves). Sounding boards provide excellent advice on how messages could be wrongly interpreted and provide recommendations on how to improve them.

Their feedback is shared with senior leaders, who might only be present at the top and tail of their meetings so participants can do their thinking in an unimpeded way, perhaps with the help of a facilitator. Participants often go on to become real advocates for the change programme. This is something we saw happen when we tried this approach at medical products company HARTMANN.

Apps to engage

The rise of digital, mobile and social media have converged to present great new opportunities to connect leaders and the workforce. I’m really excited about the impact these technologies can have on internal communication. Axiom is working on an app to measure engagement, pinpoint who understands what, gauge the mood of the business, and provide a direct line for two-way dialogue between leaders and the workforce. We think it will help boost performance, productivity, focus and retention of talent. If you want to get involved in the early work on this app and shape it to meet your needs, simply reach out.

Wrapping it up

Try these internal communication techniques and your leaders will be dressed for success – well placed to make well-informed decisions and deliver enhanced performance through a better engaged, informed and motivated workforce. But fail to connect with the workforce, and the business will suffer. And, like the Emperor in the fairy tale, leaders may be open to naked ridicule.

Got a business challenge that is keeping you awake at night? Keen to exploit an opportunity before the competition does?

In this blog, Axiom founder Chris Carey explores how to harness the insights and expertise of your very own staff to help you rise to the challenge

I’ve been working in the employee engagement space for 25 years now and many are the times I’ve heard a leader say ‘I know what the problem is – I just don’t know where to start in terms of trying to solve it.’ My response is clear. ‘You already have the answer – you start with the problem – and then engage with your workforce to determine the best way forward to resolve it.’

In truth, leaders aren’t the only ones who know something isn’t as good as it could be. Your people have worked that out too. They might have lost sleep about it as well and the odds are they’ve been talking to each other about how to rise to the challenge. But their passion for excellence and innovation in execution often go unheard by leaders, which actually drives disengagement.

Experience tells me that bosses and the people they lead already share a common goal, for example, to deliver an outstanding customer experience, and between them, they have the insights, experience and expertise to co-create the best possible ways forward.

And what’s more, staff invariably want to contribute; to be heard, valued and recognised, so it seems involving them is a good way forward. In fact, they want to be engaged.

Employee engagement defined and quantified

My favourite definition of employee engagement is “being positively present during the performance of work by willingly contributing intellectual effort, experiencing positive emotions and meaningful connections to others”. It’s characterised by feeling positive about a job, working hard to do the job well and feeling loyalty towards colleagues and to the organisation itself.

And so much research shows that engagement delivers better performance. As just one example, the Institute for Employment Studies reports that engaged employees deliver four times more value to an organisation than those who are disengaged. That’s incredibly significant for any organisation, right?

Engaged employees go the extra mile – even when times are tough. Indeed our own research shows the efficacy of engagement, for example in communicating business strategy.

Five steps to success

Having acknowledged that leaders are often pushing against an open door in terms of engaging with colleagues to deliver on a common goal, it’s worth exploring five steps to success that have stood the test of time in many sectors and even more organisations.

Understand your people

The better you understand the people you are engaging with, the more likely you are to be able to shape your messages and engage those concerned in what you are all trying to achieve. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and ask: What do they want or need to know? Why do they want to know it? What do they already know? What might motivate or engage them? What won’t work? And if you don’t know – ask them.

Identify and define your messages

Decide what you want people to think, feel and do differently. Make that the basis of your key messages. In particular, remember the importance of the ‘why’ and ‘so what?’ in engagement. Your messages must answer employees’ fundamental questions: What’s in it for me? Why is this good for my stakeholders / customers? Aim for between three and five key messages; any more, and people will struggle to see the wood for the trees.

Enlist and upskill line managers

Time and again, employees say that their line manager is their communication channel of choice, especially in times of change. The extent of their engagement depends on line managers. You need to upskill your managers so they can communicate with verve (especially face to face) and act as positive role models who truly own the messages they are delivering.

One of the best ways of doing this is by exploiting the power of images and storytelling to make a strategy or change convincing and meaningful. They act as catalysts for discussions in which senior leadership and local work teams identify and explore what they need to do to contribute and commit to action.

Check you’re getting through

It’s all very well delivering shiny new communications solutions, but are they making a difference? Are you getting the results you’re looking for, or just moving a lot of hot air? You need to measure whether messages have been received, believed and understood and, ultimately, acted on. If not, you need to do something different.

Be positively infectious

And once you’ve got the evidence that your engagement is working, don’t keep it a secret. Share it, publicise it, promote it.

Effective employee engagement is positively infectious, disengagement is infectious too and potentially more virulent. Make sure yours is the right kind of ‘catchy’ and you can deliver better performance in your organisation – you might even get a bit more sleep.

For more useful articles and tools to help drive your employee engagement check out:

A new app to help comms professionals drive employee engagement is due to be launched by the end of this year.

Powered by Axiom’s 25 years of hard-won specialist experience, Engage will be the first app designed specifically to aid employee engagement programmes.

The app can be used to gauge employees’ levels of understanding of key messages, canvass their opinions on the hot topics in your business and provide a channel for them to ask questions and propose ideas.

Engage gives you comprehensive and reliable data on how well your key messages are being received and understood and, over time, builds an engagement index for each of your audiences. And you get all of this in real time on your tablet or mobile.

What Engage delivers: Key features

For employees

Interactive, fun activities

Channel to feedback direct to leaders

Built-in recognition scheme

The chance to have your voice heard

Anonymity option

For comms teams

Valuable informatics to shape comms and engagement activity

Snapshots of excellence and under-performance

Full brand customisation

Audience segmentation options

Notification pushes

For leaders

At-a-glance engagement index

A way to gauge the return on investment in comms and engagement – at last!

A new channel to understand employee sentiment

Engage is currently in beta with a group of comms professionals testing it in their organisations. If you are interested in joining our early-adopter group, call us on +44 033 3088 3088 or use our contact form. We can give you a free demo and tell you more.